Adairs, the Australian homewares chain, will close all seven of its New Zealand stores by June. A national retailer is about to hand thousands of its customers back to the market — and most of the independents trading in the same catchments will do nothing to catch them.
That last part is the opportunity. A competitor's exit is rarely just bad news for the sector. For the shops left standing nearby, it opens a short, specific window.
When a chain leaves, its customers go looking for a new default
People who shopped Adairs for bedding, manchester, and soft furnishings now need somewhere else to buy them. For a few weeks, they're actively choosing a new default: trying shops, comparing ranges, deciding where this category lives for them from now on.
After that, they settle. The retailers who win the reshuffle are the ones who move while the window is open, not the ones who notice three months later that a few unfamiliar faces have started turning up. The customers were available the whole time. Someone else just made the effort to be findable first.
This is a catchment question first
Start with geography. Which of your stores actually overlap a closing Adairs? Map the drive-time catchments and the shopping centres those stores anchored. If you run a homewares, gift, or department-style range within roughly 10–15 minutes of a closing store, you're in that catchment whether you've thought about it that way or not.
This is ordinary catchment analysis, and it tells you where the displaced customers physically are. Without it, "we should pick up some of that business" stays a vague hope. With it, you know which of your locations to point your attention and budget at.
Then a category question
Next, look at what Adairs owned that you already carry. Pull your own category data and find where your range is thin in exactly the lines a displaced shopper wants — quality bedding, towels, manchester, the homewares basics. A gap you can close cheaply, with a handful of SKUs and better merchandising, is worth far more right now than a broad range refresh you've been putting off.
The point isn't to become a homewares specialist overnight. It's to make sure that when one of those customers walks in, the thing they used to buy at Adairs is on your shelf and easy to find.
Then an acquisition question
A displaced customer is the cheapest acquisition you'll get all year. They already buy the category and they've just lost their shop. You don't have to create demand — only to be the obvious next stop.
A targeted, local message beats a blanket discount here. "Your new home for bedding and manchester in [suburb]" does more than 20% off storewide, because it speaks to the specific need the closure created. If you have any catchment-level marketing at all — local social, letterbox, in-centre signage — point it at this for the next six to eight weeks.
The wider signal: exits will keep coming
Adairs isn't an isolated case. Company liquidations hit a 15-year high in 2025, and insolvency appointments are expected to stay elevated through the middle of 2026. More chains and more independents will exit before this cycle turns.
The retailers who treat each closure as a catchment-and-category opportunity (with a repeatable playbook rather than a scramble) will quietly consolidate share while the sector shrinks. And the same data that finds opportunity in a competitor's exit will warn you if you're drifting towards being the one that closes: cash runway, repeat-customer rate, promotional dependency, and category-level margin are the indicators that move first.
One thing to do this week
Find the closing Adairs stores nearest you and map which of your locations share their catchment. For each overlap, list the three categories Adairs owned that you also sell — then check whether you're genuinely well-stocked and visible in those lines today. That short list is your customer-acquisition plan for the next two months.
If you want help drawing the catchments and sizing the opportunity properly, our Store Network Intelligence service does exactly this — catchment overlap, category gaps, and where displaced demand is most winnable. Or run our free Retail Health Scorecard first to check your own position before you go chasing someone else's customers.